project Dexiatower 02: Who's afraid of RGB?

"Who's afraid of Red, Green and Blue" _ cycle of time-based illuminations on the Dexia tower, by LAb[au], 2007

LAb[au] proposes with 'Who's afraid of Red, Green and Blue' a series of time-based artworks, according to logics of the RGB-code and the concept of circadian distortion, establishing a language proper to the Brussels Dexia tower and its urban context.

The series takes as starting point Brussels' 145 m high Dexia Tower, from which 4200 windows can be individually color-enlightened by RGB-led bars. Rather than considering this façade as an immense screen-like display, the project expresses its very medium: light.

The RGB color model is an additive model in which red, green, and blue are combined in various ways to reproduce other colors. The name of the model and the abbreviation ‘RGB' comes from its three primary colors; red, green, and blue, unlike the primary colors in the fine arts being red, blue, and yellow.

The  title ‘Who's afraid of Red, Green and Blue' refers to the 1950's series ‘Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue' from the American artist Barnett Newman, one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the 'colour field painters'. He used large, hard edged areas of saturated colours punctuated by narrow coloured vertical bands. This vocabulary reduces painting to its very elements such as colours and divisions, a painting in its most pure state, freed of any figurative aspects. In opposite to the elementary language of Mondriaan's neo-plasticism, Newman's works were searching for a symbolic expression in abstract art, rather than an auto-referential language of its constituting elements.

Contrary to a first rather polemic understanding, the title establishes a rhetoric (question) confronting with the meaning and means of painting, as it directly questions the relationship in between the painting (object) and the viewer (subject). In this sense, the reference to the Barnett Newman series' is based on the research of a vocabulary of colour and shapes as a proper language for the time based enlightening of the Dexia Tower. The artwork, based on the elementary codes of light, researches a symbolic value proper to the status of the tower being an urban, thus collective, sign. Furthermore, the concept of the project relating light to time, introduces the notion of circadian rhythm. A circadian rhythm is a roughly-24-hour cycle in the physiological processes of living beings, mostly modulated by external cues such as sunlight and temperature. A ‘circadian distortion' encompasses the shift into the alternation of day and night:

"With the introduction of gas lighting and then electricity in the mid-19th century, our relation to astronomical temporal rhythms and the alternation of day and night started to undergo far-reaching changes. "Making day out of night", as Heidegger put it, is one of the major physical upheavals in the method of inhabiting, at once urban and domestic, which turns into another night into another day, at 1000 lux. The Internet and overall mobility have further speeded up this distortion of temporal rhythms. It is a permanent day that is unfurled today, like a continuous and immediate luminosity, all round the planet, spread, always and everywhere, by electric lighting and the light of screens. The earth has stopped revolving around its own axis and our body, removed from its Circadian biological rhythms is sleepless. (...)" ( Décosterd & Rahm, Distortions, Editions HYX, 2005.)